By Nury Vittachi

Friday, 29 June 2012

The REAL biggest country

SHOCKER: ONE OF THE world’s best-known statistics has just been proven wrong. When it comes to human population, which is the largest country in the world?

No, it’s not China. Nor India.

Instead of looking at the number of humans in each country, researchers calculated how many actual kilos of human flesh are found in each place.

The results, published last week, show that the largest concentration of humanity on the planet is not in China, but in North America. FINALLY, a positive angle to being fat.

Asians make up 61 percent of the world’s population but we are so puny that we add up to a mere 13 percent of human biomass, it said. North Americans make up just six percent of the world’s population but they are so gigantic that they provide 34 percent of the world’s human biomass.

Perhaps the most dramatic finding in the report, issued by BMC Public Health, is that there are 15 million tonnes of excess human fat in the world.

And what does it matter anyway? Just because a person weighs 14 million tonnes, why should she pay for two seats on the train?

Was it her fault that she ate a medium-sized Friesian cow and two dozen donuts every day?

The report also says that the human race as a whole weighs 287 million tonnes.

I’m going to pin that page in my bathroom, so that whenever my weighing machine delivers bad news, I can rejoice: “Wow. I weigh significantly less than humanity as a whole!”

***

SUPERHERO FANS such as myself are stunned now that DC Comics has revealed that Green Lantern is gay.

In the next issue he’ll get a new superpower: the ability to choose wallpapers which perfectly complement sofa sets.

I can’t wait!

Incidentally, this is all revealed in an adventure which ends up in Hong Kong, the home town of this writer.

The curious thing is that Greenie and his boyfriend get on a “bullet train” for a couple of hours, according to the dialogue. Clearly they have no idea how small Hong Kong island is. A couple of hours in a bullet train would take you to the open seas.

But the artists’ vision of Hong Kong is kinda cool:

***

REPORTS SENT in by my network of crime-spotters show a trend.

1) In Scotland thieves broke into a kebab shop and stole a roll of pressed meat.

2) A huge amount of mayonnaise was taken from a warehouse north of Adelaide. “Police urge anyone who has heard of people making large amounts of coleslaw or potato salad to call investigators,” said a report from NewsCore.

3) In the US town of Athens, Georgia, crooks stole 400,000 toothpicks.

Clearly the international criminal fraternity is planning its annual dinner.

*** A METEORITE crashed through the roof of a house in Paris last week. More meteorites land in France than any other country, scientists said, but no one knows why.

I suspect they’re being lobbed over the channel from England.

*** A MAN WITH a screwdriver reportedly robbed a full-time Singaporean army soldier of his assault rifle last week, reader Naren Thiyagarajan told me.

Good thing the alleged assailant didn’t have a Swiss army knife, or the entire government might have collapsed, leaving distraught citizens making anguished laments such as “Thank God” and “About time”.

***

SOME SOUTH Asians are running campaigns to make “drone attacks” illegal. Where were these people when I was at school? Why weren’t my teachers arrested?

(My class after a “drone attack” by our history teacher.)*** BOOK UPDATE: book still not much above 18,000 words, as I took the last two days off from it to write some newspaper/ magazine columns and experiment a bit more with Dragon dictation program. General feeling at the moment is that typing is still faster than talking to your computer, when you factor in all the corrections you have to make.

***

TODAY IS THE LAST DAY of school. Kids going wild – and so are the teachers, who were already partying last night.